by Grant Allen
“If I invite you to come,” Hugh answered significantly with curt emphasis.
“Ah yes, of course,” the artist answered. “I dare say when you start your carriage, you’ll be too proud to remember a poor devil of an oil and color-man like me. In those days, no doubt you’ll migrate like the rest to the Athenaeum. Well, well, the world moves once every twenty-four hours on its own axis and in the long run we all move with it and go up together. When I’m an R. A., I’ll run down and visit you at the ancestral mansion, and perhaps paint your wife’s portrait for a thousand guineas, bien entendu. And what sort of a body is the prospective father-in-law?”
“Oh, just the usual type of Suffolk Squire, don’t you know,” Massinger replied carelessly. “A breeder of fat oxen and of pigs, a pamphleteer on Guano and on Grain, a quarter-session chairman, abler none; but with a faint reminiscences still of an Oxford training left in him to keep the milk of human kindness from turning sour by long exposure to the pernicious influence of the East Anglian sunshine. I should enjoy his society better, however, if I were a trifle deaf. He has less to say, and he says it more, than any other man of my acquaintance. Still, he’s a jolly old boy enough, as old boys go. We shall rub along somehow till he pops off the hooks and leaves us the paternal acres on our own account to make merry upon.”
So far Hugh had tried with decent success to keep up his usual appearance of careless ease and languid goodhumor, in spite of volcanic internal desires to avoid the painful subject of his approaching marriage altogether. He was schooling himself, indeed, to face society. He was sure to hear much of his Suffolk trip, and it was well to get used to it as early as possible. But the next question fairly blanched his cheek, by leading up direct to the skeleton in the cupboard: “How did you first come to get acquainted with them?”
The question must inevitably be asked again, and he must do his best to face it with pretended equanimity. “A relation of mine a distant cousin a Girton girl was living with the family as Miss Meysey’s governess or companion or something,” he answered with what jauntiness he could summon up. “It was through her that I first got to know my future wife. And old Mr. Meysey, the coming pap-in-law.”
He stopped dead short. Words failed him. His jaw fell abruptly. A strange thrill seemed to course through his frame. His large black eyes protruded suddenly from their sunken orbits; his olive-colored cheek blanched pale and pasty. Some unexpected emotion had evidently checked his ready flow of speech. Mitchison and the painter turned round in surprise to see what might be the cause of this unwonted flutter. It was merely Warren Relf who had entered the club, and was gazing with a stony British stare from head to foot at Hugh Massinger.
The poet wavered, but he did not flinch. From the fixed look in Relf’s eye, he felt certain in an instant that the skipper of the “Mud-Turtle” knew something if not everything of his fatal secret. How much did he know? and how much not? that was the question. Had he tracked Elsie to her nameless grave at Orfordness? Had he recognized the body in the mortuary at the lighthouse? Had he learned from the cutter’s man the horrid truth as to the corpse’s identity? All these things or any one of them might well have happened to the owner of the “Mud-Turtle,” cruising in and out of East Anglian creeks in his ubiquitous little vessel. Warren Relf was plainly a dangerous subject. But in any case, Hugh thought with shame, how rash, how imprudent, how unworthy of himself thus to betray in his own face and features the terror and astonishment with which he regarded him! He might have known Relf was likely to drop in any day at the club! He might have known he would sooner or later meet him there! He might have prepared beforehand a neat little lie to deliver pat with a casual air of truth on their first greeting! And instead of all that, here he was, discomposed and startled, gazing the painter straight in the face like a dazed fool, and never knowing how or where on earth to start any ordinary subject of polite conversation. For the first time in his adult life he was so taken aback with childish awe and mute surprise that he felt positively relieved when Relf boarded him with the double-barrelled question: “And how did you leave Miss Meysey and Miss Challoner, Massinger?”
Hugh drew him aside toward the back of the room and lowered his voice still more markedly in reply. “I left Miss Meysey very well,” he answered with as much ease of manner as he could hastily assume. “You may perhaps have heard from rumour or from the public prints that she and I have struck up an engagement. In the lucid language of the newspaper announcements, a marriage has been definitely arranged between us.”
Warren Relf bent his head in sober acquiescence. “I had heard so,” he said with grim formality. “Your siege was successful. You carried the citadel by storm that day in the sandhills. I won’t congratulate you. You know my opinion already of marriages arranged upon that mercantile basis. I told it you beforehand. We need not now recur to the subject. But Miss Challoner? How about her? Did you leave her well? Is she still at Whitestrand?” He looked his man through and through as he spoke, with a cold stern light in those truthful eyes of his.
Hugh Massinger shuffled uneasily before his steadfast glance. Was it only his own poor guilty conscience, or did Relf know all? he wondered silently. The man was eyeing him like his evil angel. He longed for time to pause and reflect; to think out the best possible noncommitting lie in answer to this direct and leading question. How to parry that deadly thrust on the spur of the moment he knew not. Relf was gazing at him intently. Hesitation would be fatal. He blundered into the first form of answer that came uppermost. “My cousin Elsie has gone away,” he stammered out in haste. “She she left the Meyseys quite abruptly.”
“As a consequence of your engagement?” Relf asked sternly.
This was going one step too far. Hugh Massinger felt really indignant now, and his indignation enabled him to cover his retreat a little more gracefully. “You have no right to ask me that,” he answered in genuine anger. “My private relations with my own family are surely no concern of yours or of any one’s.”
Warren Relf bowed his head grimly once more. “Where has she gone?” he asked in a searching voice. “I’m interested in Miss Challoner. I may venture to inquire that much at least. I’m told you’ve heard from her. Where is she now? Will you kindly tell me?”
“I don’t know,” Hugh answered angrily, driven to bay. Then with a sudden inspiration, he added significantly: “Do you either?”
“Yes,” Warren Relf responded with solemn directness.
The answer took Massinger aback once more. A cold shudder ran down his spine. Their eyes met. For a moment they stared one another out. Then Hugh’s glance fell slowly and heavily. He dared not ask one word more. Relf must have tracked her, for certain, to the lighthouse. He must have seen the grave, perhaps even the body. This was too terrible. Henceforth, it was war to the knife between them. “Hast thou found me, O my enemy?” he broke out sullenly.
“I have found you, Massinger, and I have found you out,” the painter answered in a very low voice, with a sudden burst of unpremeditated frankness. “I know you now for exactly the very creature you are a liar, a forger, a coward, and only two ringers’ width short of a murderer. There! you may make what use you like of that. For myself, I will make no use at all of it. For reasons of my own, I will let you go. I could crush you if I would, but I prefer to screen you. Still, I tell you once for all the truth. Remember it well. I know it; you know it; and we both know we each of us know it.”
Hugh Massinger’s fingers itched inexpressibly that moment to close round the painter’s honest bronzed throat in a wild death-like struggle. He was a passionate man, and the provocation was terrible. The provocation was terrible because it was all true. He was a liar, a forger, a coward and a murderer! But he dared not he dared not. To thrust those hateful words down Relf’s throat would be to court exposure, and worse than exposure; and exposure was just what Hugh Massinger could never bear to face like a man. Sooner than that, the river, or aconite. He must swallow it all, proud soul as he was. He must swa
llow it all, now and forever.
As he stood there irresolute, with blanched lips and itching fingers, his nails pressed hard into the palms of his hands in the fierce endeavor to repress his passion, he felt a sudden light touch on his right shoulder. It was Hatherly once more. “I say, Massinger,” the journalist put in lightly, all unconscious of the tragedy he was interrupting, “come down and knock about the balls on the table a bit, will you?”
If Hugh Massinger was to go on living at all, he must go on living in the wonted fashion of nineteenth-century literate humanity. Tragedy must hide itself behind the scenes; in public he must still be the prince of high comedians. He unclosed his hands and let go his breath with a terrible effort. Relf stood aside to let him pass. Their glances met as Hugh left the room arm in arm with Hatherly. Relfs was a glance of contempt and scorn; Hugh Massinger’s was one of undying hatred.
He had murdered Elsie, and Relf knew it. That was the way Massinger interpreted to himself the “Yes” that the painter had just now so truthfully and directly answered him.
CHAPTER XX.
EVENTS MARCH.
“Papa is still in Scotland,” Winifred wrote to Hugh, “slaying many grouse; and mamma and I have the place all to ourselves now, so we’re really having a lovely time, enjoying our holiday immensely (though you’re not here), taking down everything, and washing and polishing, and rearranging things again, and playing havoc with the household gods generally. We expect papa back Friday. His birds have preceded him. I do hope he remembered to send you a brace or two. I gave him your town address before he left, with very special directions to let you have some; but, you know, you men always forget everything. As soon as he comes home, he’ll make us take our alterations all down again, which will be a horrid nuisance, for the drawing-room does look so perfectly lovely. We’ve done it up exactly as you recommended, with the sage green plush for the old mantelpiece, and a red Japanese table in the dark corner; and I really think, now I see the effect, your taste’s simply exquisite. But then, you know, what else can you expect for a distinguished poet! You always do everything beautifully and I think you’re a darling.”
At any other time this naive girlish appreciation of his decorative talents would have pleased and flattered Hugh’s susceptible soul; for, being a man, he was of course vain; and he loved a pretty girl’s approbation dearly. But just at that moment he had no stomach for praise, even though it came from Sir Hubert Stanley; and whatever faint rising flush of pleasure he might possibly have felt at his little fiancee’s ecstatic admiration was all crushed down again into the gall of bitterness by the sickening refrain of her repeated postscripts: “No further news yet from poor Elsie. Has she written to you? I shall be simply frantic if I don’t hear from her soon. She can never mean to leave us all in doubt like this. I’m going to advertise tomorrow in the London papers. If only she knew the state of mind she was plunging me into, I’m sure she’d write and relieve my suspense, which is just agonizing.” A kiss from your little one: in the corner here. Be sure you kiss it where I’ve put the cross. Good-night, darling Hugh. Yours ever, Winifred.”
Hugh flung the letter down on the floor of his chamber in an agony of horror. Was his crime to pursue him thus through a whole lifetime? Was he always to hear surmises, conjectures, speculations, doubts as to what on earth had become of Elsie? Was he never to be free for a single second from the shadow of that awful pursuing episode? Was Winifred, when she became his wedded wife, to torture and rack him for years together with questions and hesitations about the poor dead child who lay, as he firmly and unreservedly believed, in her nameless grave by the lighthouse at Orfordness? There was Only one possible way out of it a way that Hugh shrank from almost as much as he shrank from the terror and shame of exposure. It was ghastly: it was gruesome: it was past endurance; but it was the one solitary way of safety. He must write a letter from time to time, in Elsie’s handwriting, addressed to Winifred, giving a fictitious account of Elsie’s doings in an imaginary home, away over somewhere in America or the antipodes. He must invent a new life and a new life-history, under the Southern Cross, for poor dead Elsie: he must keep her alive like a character in a novel, and spin her fresh surroundings from his own brain, in some little-known and inaccessible quarter of the universe.
But then, what a slavery, what a drudgery, what a perpetual torture! His soul shrank from the hideous continued deceit. To have perpetrated that one old fatal forgery, in the first fresh flush of terror and remorse, was not perhaps quite so wicked, quite so horrible, quite so soul-destroying as this new departure. He had then at least the poor lame excuse of a pressing emergency; and it was once only. But to live a life of consistent lying to go on fathering a perennial fraud to forge pretended letters from mail to mail to invent a long tissue of successful falsehoods and that about a matter that lay nearest and dearest to his own wounded and remorseful heart all this was utterly and wholly repugnant to Hugh Massinger’s underlying nature. Set aside the wickedness and baseness of it all, the poet was a proud and sensitive man; and lying on such an extended scale was abhorrent to his soul from its mere ignominy and aesthetic repulsiveness. He liked the truth: he admired the open, frank, straightforward way. Tortuous cunning and mean subterfuges roused his profoundest contempt and loathing when he saw them in others. Up till now, he had enjoyed his own unquestioning self-respect. Vain and shallow and unscrupulous as he was, he had hitherto basked serenely in the sunshine of his own personal approbation. He had done nothing till lately that sinned against his private and peculiar code of morals, such as His proposal to Winifred had, for the first time, opened the sluices of the great unknown within him, and hornless depths of deceit and crime were welling up now and crowding in upon him to drown and obliterate whatever spark or scintillation of conscience had ever been his. It was a hateful sight. He shrank himself from the effort to realize it.
And Warren Relf knew all! That in itself was bad enough. But if he also invented a continuous lie to palm off upon Winifred and her unsuspecting people, then Warren Relf at least would know it constantly for what it was, and despise him for it even more profoundly than he despised him at present. All that was horrible horrible horrible. Yet there was one person whose opinion mattered to him far more than even Warren Relf’s one person who would hate and despise with a deadly hatred and utter scorn the horrid perfidy of his proposed line of conduct. That person was one with whom he sat and drank familiarly every day, with whom he conversed unreservedly night and morning, with whom he lived and moved and had his being. He could never escape or deceive or outwit Hugh Massinger. Patriae quis exsul se quoque fugit? Hugh Massinger would dog him, and follow his footsteps wherever he went, with his unfeigned contempt for so dirty and despicable a course of action. It was vile, it was loathsome, it was mean, it was horrible in its ghastly charnel-house falseness and foulness; and Hugh Massinger knew it perfectly. If he yielded to this last and lowest temptation of Satan, he might walk about henceforth with his outer man a whited sepulcher but within he would be full of dead men’s bones and vile imaginings of impossible evil.
Thinking which things definitely to himself, in his own tormented and horrified soul, he sat down and wrote another forged letter.
It was a hasty note, written as in the hurry and bustle of departure, on the very eve of a long journey, and it told Winifred, in rapid general terms, that Elsie was just on her way to the continent, en route for Australia no matter where. She would join her steamer (no line mentioned) under an assumed name, perhaps at Marseilles, perhaps at Genoa, perhaps at Naples, perhaps at Brindisi. Useless to dream of tracking or identifying her. She was going away from England for ever and ever this last underlined in feminine fashion and it would be quite hopeless for Winifred to cherish the vain idea of seeing her again in this world of misfortunes. Some day, perhaps, her conduct would be explained and vindicated; for the present, it must suffice that letters sent to her at the address as before the porter’s of the Cheyne Row Club, though Hugh did not speci
fically mention that fact would finally reach her by private arrangement. Would Winifred accept the accompanying ring, and wear it always on her own finger, as a parting gift from her affectionate and misunderstood friend, Elsie?
The ring was one from the little jewel-case he had stolen that fatal night from Elsie’s bedroom. Profoundly as he hated and loathed himself for his deception, he couldn’t help stopping half way through to admire his own devilry of cleverness in sending that ring back now to Winifred. Nothing could be so calculated to disarm suspicion. Who could doubt that Elsie was indeed alive, when Elsie not only wrote letters to her friends, but sent with them the very jewelry from her own fingers as a visible pledge and token of her identity? Besides, he really wanted Winifred to wear it; he wished her to have something that once was Elsie’s. He would like the woman he was now deceiving to be linked by some visible bond of memory to the woman he had deceived and lured to her destruction.
He kissed the ring, a hot burning kiss, and wrapped it reverently and tenderly in cotton-wool. That done, he gummed and stamped the letter with a resolute air, crushed his hat firmly down on his head, and strode out with feverishly long strides from his rooms in Jermyn Street to the doubtful hospitality of the Cheyne Row.
Would Warren Relf be there again, he wondered? Was that man to poison half London for him in future? Why on earth, knowing the whole truth about Elsie knowing that Elsie was dead and buried at Orfordness did the fellow mean to hold his vile tongue and allow him, Hugh Massinger, to put about this elaborate fiction unchecked, of her sudden and causeless disappearance? Inexplicable quite! The thing was a mystery; and Hugh Massinger hated mysteries. He could never know now at what unexpected moment Warren Relf might swoop down upon him from behind with a dash and a crash and an explosive exposure. He was working in the dark, like nawies in a tunnel. Surely the crash must come some day! The roof must collapse and crush him utterly. It was ghastly to wait in long blind expectation of it.
